Fear, tainted trust at Westlawn

Thursday

For the last 18 years, Deliris Agosto has been digging in her housing development's ground every summer with her bare hands and a shovel. Often, her knuckles and feet blistered up with rashes.

Deliris Agosto remembers winning second place in a New Bedford Housing Authority garden beautification contest back in 1996.

Agosto, 50, said she didn't enter last year's contest. But for the last 18 years, she said, she's been digging in her Westlawn housing development's ground every summer with her bare hands and a shovel. Often, her knuckles and feet blistered up with rashes.

"She says that all these years she's always been touching the ground," said Alberto Ramos, who also lives in the development and who translated from Spanish.

Agosto has been digging in the same ground where the Environmental Protection Agency announced last week it has found widespread occurrences of lead (roughly 50 spots out of 69 tested) in the soil.

The 100-unit development is thought to have once been part of the Parker Street dump.

The EPA also found a variety of metals (arsenic, chromium, cadmium), as well the organic chemical PAHs, or polycyclic-aromatic hydrocarbons, in concentrations that exceeded state safety levels.

The great majority of the pollutants were located deeper than 3 feet in the ground at the 69 locations tested, but "a limited number" were found from the surface to 3 feet.

The EPA at a Sept. 23 meeting with Westlawn residents did not specify exactly how many contaminants were close to the surface, but an examination of maps handed out at the meeting showed 28 instances of lead between the surface and 3 feet; eight locations where PAHs were at that level; and two locations for cadmium.

The EPA says none of the contaminants pose an "imminent hazard" to the residents but officials acknowledged some of them pose a "current and future significant risk."

EPA Emergency Response Coordinator Steven Novick explained that significant risk means that if you're exposed to the contaminant for 30 years you might get sick. Imminent hazard might get you sick after five years.

At the sparsely attended EPA meeting (roughly 10 of 100 Westlawn heads-of-households), the agency placed fliers on a table that told residents to "limit activities that disturb the top three feet of soil" in areas where contaminants were found in the top 3 feet of soil.

A week after the meeting, a Standard-Times walkthrough of the property found a unit with a tomato garden (with one ripe on the vine) and several units with large flower gardens.

Steven Beauregard, the authority's new executive director, said he wouldn't eat tomatoes from the development. But he said the authority can only do so much to inform tenants, that it had put fliers in all mailboxes about the EPA meeting.

"We're not a baby-sitting service," he said.

Given the results of The Standard-Times walkthrough, Beauregard said the authority would have the property manager examine which properties have gardens, and talk directly to the tenants.

No one answered the door at 332B Smith St., the property with the tomato plants growing.

Several showed the newspaper rough-skin rashes and say they are not convinced by the federal government's analysis of the risk.

The EPA gave only brief presentations on Sept. 23 and then offered to talk with residents individually. It did not provide a forum for people to ask questions in front of other residents.

The Westlawn residents give anecdotal examples of a variety of illnesses present at the housing development — everything from a 20-year-old with lymph cancer to multiple children with asthma and autism.

Elisa Silva, 30, lives in a Maxfield Street unit and talks about her 6-year-old daughter, Jalynn, being born with a cleft palate. The doctors told her the birth defect is often inherited but she said neither she nor the father have cleft palate in the family.

"It was a shock when I found out," she said.

Silva pointed out that there are sinkholes around the development where the land drops a foot or so below ground level.

"You get holes everywhere," she said, pointing to a corner between her stairway and her unit's foundation. "They usually come and they patch it up."

It's especially the rashes, which several women showed this reporter, that have many residents convinced the development is unsafe.

"There's one common denominator. We all lived at the Parker Street waste site," said Karrie-Ann Soto, a member of Citizens Leading Environmental Action Network who two years ago moved to Taunton.

The EPA plans to remove all the soil at the housing development down to 3 feet next spring and replace it with clean fill.

But the residents of Westlawn fear that the damage may already have been done to them and their children, and that soil beneath their homes is also dangerous.

Deidre Ramos, 30, a CLEAN watchdog member, has an 8-year-old son with a neurological disorder and a 6-year-old who is autistic.

"I have half the child I should have," she said of her autistic son, Aidyn.

Beauregard said that the authority takes the issue very seriously, including the cost of the cleanup.

"We're going to take the data and get HUD involved," he said.

That's not enough for Ramos.

She wants the Housing Authority to move her family away from Westlawn. She said she might accept a housing voucher for private housing but she doesn't want to live in another development.

"If they can't protect me here, what makes you think every other housing development doesn't have the same thing?" she asked.

Contact Jack Spillane at jspillane@s-t.com

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